The Robber Bride

by Margaret Atwood

  On the refrigerator, attached to it by magnets in the form of smiling pigs and cats, are the Valentines the twins made for her at school. The twins are clinging these days, they want her around. They don't like her going out at night. They didn't wait for Valentine's Day, they brought their Valentines home and gave them to her right away, as if there was some urgency. These are the only Valentines she will get. Probably they are the only ones she will get ever again. They should be enough for her. What does she want with glowing hearts, with incandescent lips and rapid breathing, at her age?

  Snap out of it, Roz, she tells herself. You are not old. Your life is not over.

  It only feels like that.

  Mitch is in the city. He's around. He comes to see the children and Roz arranges to be out, her skin prickling the whole time with awareness of him. When she walks into the house after he's gone she can smell him - his aftershave, the English heather stuff, could it be he's sprinkled some of it around just to get to her? She glimpses him in restaurants, or at the yacht club. She stops going to those places. She picks up the phone and he's on the other line with one of the kids. The whole world is booby-trapped. She is the booby.

  Their lawyers talk. A separation agreement is suggested, though Mitch stalls; he doesn't want Roz - or else he would be here, wouldn't he, on the doorstep again, wouldn't he at least be asking? - but he doesn't want to be separated from her either. Or maybe he's just bargaining, maybe he's just trying to get the price up. Roz grits her teeth and holds the line. This is going to cost her but it will be worth it to cut the string, the tie, the chain, whatever this heavy thing is that's holding her down. You need to know when to fold. At any rate she's functioning. More or less. Though she's done better.

  She goes off to see a shrink, to see if she can improve herself, make herself over into a new woman, one who no longer gives a shit. She would like that. The shrink is a nice person; Roz likes her. Together the two of them labour over Roz's life as if it's a jigsaw puzzle, a mystery story with a solution at the end. They arrange and rearrange the pieces, trying to get them to come out better. They are hopeful: if Roz can figure out what story she's in, then they will be able to spot the erroneous turns she took, they can retrace her steps, they can change the ending. They work out a tentative plot. Maybe Roz married Mitch because, although she thought at the time that Mitch was very different from her father, she sensed he was the same underneath. He would cheat on her the way her father had cheated on her mother, and she would keep forgiving him and taking him back just the way her mother had. She would rescue him, over and over. She would play the saint and he the sinner.

  Except that her parents ended up together and Roz and Mitch did not, so what went wrong? Zenia went wrong. Zenia switched the plot on Roz, from rescue to running away, and then when Mitch wanted to be rescued again Roz was no longer up to it. Whose fault was that? Who was to blame? Ah. Didn't Roz think that too much time was spent apportioning blame? Did she blame, perhaps, herself? In a word, yes. Maybe she still can't quite leave God out of it, and the notion that she's being punished.

  Maybe it was nobody's fault, the shrink suggests. Maybe these things just happen, like plane crashes.

  If Roz wants Mitch back that badly - and it appears that she does, now that she has a greater insight into the dynamics of their relationship - maybe she should ask him to come for counselling. Maybe she should forgive him, at least to that extent.

  All this is very reasonable. Roz thinks of making the phone call. She is almost nerved up to it, she is almost there. Then, in drizzly March, Zenia dies. Is killed in Lebanon, blown up by a bomb; comes back in a tin can, and is buried. Roz does not cry. Instead she rejoices fiercely - if there was a bonfire she'd dance around it, shaking a tambourine if one was provided. But after that she's afraid, because Zenia is nothing if not vengeful. Being dead won't alter that. She'll think of something.

  Mitch isn't at the funeral. Roz cranes her neck, scanning for him, but there's only a bunch of men she doesn't know. And Tony and Charis, of course.

  She wonders whether Mitch has heard, and if he has, how he's taking it. She ought to feel that Zenia has been cleared out of the way, like a moth-eaten fur coat, a tree branch fallen across the path, but she doesn't. Zenia dead is more of a barrier than Zenia alive; though, as she tells the shrink, she can't explain why. Could it be remorse, because Zenia the hated rival is dead and Roz wanted her to be, and Roz is not? Possibly. You aren't responsible for everything, says the shrink.

  Surely Mitch will now change, appear, react. Wake up, as if from hypnotism. But he doesn't phone. He makes no sign, and now it's April, the first week, the second week, the third. When Roz calls his lawyer, finally, to find out where he is, the lawyer can't say. Something was mentioned about a trip, he seems to recall. Where? The lawyer doesn't know.

  Where Mitch is, is in Lake Ontario. He's been there a while. The police pick up his boat, the Rosalind II, drifting with sails furled, and eventually Mitch himself washes into shore off the Scarborough Bluffs. He has his lifejacket on, but at this time of year the hypothermia would have taken him very quickly. He must have slipped, they tell her. Slipped off and fallen in, and been unable to climb back on. There was a wind, the day he left harbour. An accident. If it had been suicide he wouldn't have been wearing his lifejacket. Would he?

  He would, he would, thinks Roz. He did that part of it for the kids. He didn't want to leave a bad package for them. He did love them enough for that. But he knew all about the temperature of the water, he'd lectured her about it often enough. Your body heat dissipates, quick as a wink. You numb, and then you die. And so he did. That it was deliberate Roz has no doubt, but she doesn't say. It was an accident, she tells the children. Accidents happen.

  She has to tidy up after him, of course. Pick up the odds and ends. Clean up the mess. She is, after all, still his wife.

  The worst thing is the apartment, the apartment he shared with Zenia. He didn't go back to it after she left, after he chased off to Europe to find her. Some of his clothes are still in the closet - his impressive suits, his beautiful shirts, his ties. Roz folds and packs, as so often before. His shoes, emptier than empty. Wherever else he is, he isn't here.

  Zenia is a stronger presence. Most of her things are gone, but a Chinese dressing gown, rose-coloured silk with dragons embroidered on it, is hanging over a chair in the bedroom. Opium, Roz thinks, smelling it. It's the smell that bothers Roz the most. The tumbled sheets are still on the unmade bed, there are dirty towels in the bathroom. The scene of the crime. She should never have come here, this is torture. She should have sent Dolores.

  Roz gives up going to the shrink. It's the optimism that's getting to her, the belief that things can be fixed, which right now feels like just one more burden. All this and she's supposed to be hopeful, too? Thanks but no thanks. So, God, she says to herself. That was some number. Fooled me! Proud of yourself? What else have you got up your sleeve? Maybe a nice war, some genocide - hey, a plague or two? She knows she shouldn't talk this way, even to herself, it's tempting fate, but it gets her through the day.

  Getting through the day is the main thing. She puts two pending real estate deals on hold; she's in no shape to make major decisions. The magazine can run itself until she can get around to selling it, which shouldn't be too hard, because ever since the changes Zenia brought in it's showing a profit. If she can't sell it she'll fold it up. She doesn't have the heart to go on with a publication that has made such extravagant claims, claims she has so calamitously failed to embody in herself. Superwoman she's not, and failed is the key word. She's been a success at many things, but not at the one thing. Not at standing by her man. Because if Mitch drowned himself - if there wasn't enough left for him to live for - whose fault was it? Zenia's, yes, but also her own. She should have remembered about his own father, who took the same dark road. She should have let him back in.

  Getting through the day is one thing, getting through the night is another. She can't brush her
teeth in her splendid double-sinked bathroom without sensing Mitch beside her, she can't take a shower without looking to see if his damp footprints are on the floor. She can't sleep in the middle of her raspberry-coloured bed, because, more than ever, more than when he was alive but elsewhere, he is almost there. But he's not there. He's missing. He's a missing person. He's gone off someplace where she can't get at him.

  She can't sleep in her raspberry-coloured bed at all. She lies down, gets up, puts on her bathrobe, wanders downstairs to the kitchen where she burrows through the refrigerator; or she tiptoes along the upstairs hall, listening for the breathing of her children. She's anxious about them now, more than ever, and they are anxious about her. Despite her efforts to reassure them, to tell them that she is fine and everything will be all right, she frightens them. She can tell.

  It must be the flatness of her voice, her face naked of makeup and disguise. She drags a blanket around the house with her in case sleep might choose to appear. Sometimes she falls asleep on the floor, in the family room, with the television on for company. Sometimes she drinks, hoping to relax herself, conk herself out. Sometimes it works.

  Dolores quits. She says she's found another job, one with a pension plan, but Roz doesn't think it's that. It's the bad luck; Dolores is afraid of catching it. Roz will replace her, find someone else; but later, when she can think. After she's had some sleep.

  She goes to the doctor, the GP, the same one she uses for the children's coughs, and asks for some sleeping pills. Just to get her through this period, she says. The doctor is understanding, the pills are granted. She's careful with them at first, but then they don't work so well and she takes more. One evening she takes a handful of them, and a triple scotch; not out of any desire to die, she doesn't want to do that, but out of simple irritation at being awake. She ends up on the kitchen floor.

  It's Larry who finds her, coming back from a friend's. He phones the ambulance. He's old now, older than he should be. He's responsible.

  Roz comes to, and finds herself being walked around between two large nurses. Where is she? In a hospital. How weak, how embarrassing, she didn't intend to end up in such a place. "I need to go home," she says. "I need to get some rest."

  "She's coming out of it," says the one on the left.

  "You'll be fine, dear," says the other.

  Roz has not been she or dear for a long time. There's a flicker of humiliation. Then it subsides.

  Roz floats up out of the fog. She can feel the bones of her skull, thin as a skin; inside them her brain is swollen and full of pulp. Her body is dark and vast as the sky, her nerves pinpricks of brightness: the stars, long strings of them, wavering like seaweed. She could drift, she could sink. Mitch would be there.

  Then Charis is sitting beside her, beside her bed, holding her left hand. "Not yet," says Charis. "You need to come back, it's not your time. You still have things to do."

  When she's herself, when she's normal, Roz finds Charis an endearing nincompoop - let's face it, a polymath she's not - and mostly dismisses her gauzy metaphysics. Now, though, Charis reaches down with her other hand and takes hold of Roz's foot, and Roz feels grief travelling through her like a wave, up through her body and along her arm and into her hand, and out into Charis's hand, and out. Then she feels a tug, a pull, as if Charis is a long way away, on the shore, and has hold of something - something like a rope - and is hauling Roz in, out of the water, the water of the lake, where she has almost drowned. That's life over there: a beach, the sun, some small figures. Her children, waving, shouting to her, though she can't hear them. She concentrates on breathing, on forcing the air down into her lungs. She's strong enough, she can make it.

  "Yes," says Charis. "You will."

  Tony has moved into Roz's house, to be with the children. After Roz is let out of the hospital Charis moves in as well, just for a time; just until Roz is back on her feet.

  "You don't need to do this," Roz protests.

  "Somebody does," says Tony briskly. "You have other suggestions?" She's already phoned Roz's office and told them that Roz has bronchitis; also laryngitis, so she can't speak on the phone. Flowers arrive, and Charis puts them in vases and then forgets to add water. She goes to the health food store and brings back various capsules and extractions, which she feeds to Roz or else rubs onto her, and some breakfast cereals made from unknown seeds that need to be boiled a lot. Roz longs for chocolate, and Tony smuggles some in for her. "That's a good sign," she tells Roz.

  Charis has brought August with her, and the three girls play Barbie doll games together in the twins' playroom, violent games in which Barbie goes on the warpath and takes over the world and bosses everyone else around, and other games in which she comes to a nasty end. Or they dress up in Roz's old slips and sneak around the house, three princesses on an expedition. Roz rejoices to hear the loud voices again, the arguments; the twins have been far too quiet lately.

  Tony makes cups of tea, and, for dinner, olden-days tuna casseroles with cheese and potato-chip toppings, Roz thought such things had vanished from the world, and Charis massages Roz's feet with mint essence and rose oil. She tells Roz that she's an ancient soul, with connections to Peru. These things that have happened to her, which look like tragedy, are past lives working themselves out. Roz must learn from them, because that is why we return to earth: to learn. "You don't stop being who you are, in your next life," she says, "but you add things." Roz bites her tongue, because she's returning to herself again and she thinks this is diarrhea, but she would never dream of saying so because Charis means well, and Charis runs baths for her that have sticks of cinnamon and leaves floating in them, as if Roz is about to be turned into chicken stock.

  "You're spoiling me," Roz tells them. Now that she's feeling better she's made uneasy by all the fussing. She is usually the one who does these things, the hen things, the taking care. She's not used to being on the receiving end.

  "You've been on a hard journey," says Charis, in her gentle voice. "You used up a lot of your energy. Now you can let go."

  "That's not so easy," says Roz.

  "I know," says Charis. "But you've never liked easy things." By never, she means not for the past four thousand years. Which is about how old Roz feels.

  49

  Roz finds herself sitting on the cellar floor in the light from the one unshaded overhead blub, an empty plate beside her, a children's storybook open on her knees. She's twisting and untwisting her wedding ring, the ring that once meant she was married, the ring that's weighing her down, turning it on her finger as if she's unscrewing it, or else expecting some genie or other to appear from nowhere and solve everything for her. Put the pieces back together, make everything right; slide Mitch alive back into her bed where she will find him when she goes upstairs - scrubbed and scented and brushed and cunning, filled to the brim with affectionate lies, lies she can see through, lies she can deal with, twenty years younger. Another chance. Now that she knows what to do she will do it better this time. Tell me, God - why don't we get rehearsals?

  How long has she been down here, whimpering in bad light? She must go upstairs and deal with reality, whatever that may be. She must pull herself together.

  She does this by patting the pockets of her bathrobe, where she always used to keep a tissue before the twins outlawed them. Not finding any, she blots her eyes on her orange sleeve, leaving a black smear of mascara, then wipes her nose on the other sleeve. Well, who's to see, except God? According to the nuns he had a preference for cotton hankies. God, she tells him, if you hadn't wanted us to wipe our noses on our sleeves you wouldn't have given us sleeves. Or noses. Or tears, as far as that goes. Or memory, or pain.

  She slides the kids' books back onto the shelf. She should donate these books to some charity, or maybe lend them - let them loose in the world to warp some small child's mind, while she waits for her own grandchildren to appear. What grandchildren? Dream on, Roz. The twins are too young and will anyway probably grow up to be stock-ca
r racers or women who go off to live among the gorillas, something fearless and non-progenitive; as for Larry, he's in absolutely no hurry, and if the faux women he's come up with so far are any sample of what the future holds in the daughter-in-law department, Roz would rather not hold her breath.

  Life would be so much easier if there were still arranged marriages. She'd go out into the marriage market, cash in hand, bargain with a dependable marriage broker, secure a nice bride for Larry: bright but not bossy, sweet but not a pushover, and with a wide pelvic structure and a strong back. If her own marriage had been arranged, would things have turned out any worse than they did? Is it fair, to send inexperienced young girls out into the wild forest to fend for themselves? Girls with big bones and maybe not the smallest of feet. What would help would be a wise woman, some gnarly old crone who would step out from behind a tree, who would give advice, who would say No, not this one, who would say Beauty is only skin deep, in men as well as women, who would see down as far as the heart. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? An older woman knows. But how much older do you have to get before you acquire that kind of wisdom? Roz keeps expecting it to sprout in her, grow all over her, sort of like age spots; but it hasn't yet.

  She hauls herself up off the floor and dusts her behind, a mistake because her hands are covered with book dirt, as she realizes too late when she looks at them, having encountered a squashed silverfish stuck to her velour-covered buttock, and Lord knows what's been crawling over her while she's been sitting here woolgathering. Woolgathering, her mother's word, a word so old, rooted so far back in time, that although everyone knows what it means nobody knows where it came from. Why was gathering wool supposed to be lazy? Reading and thinking were both woolgathering, to her mother. Rosalind! Don't just sit there woolgathering! Sweep the front walk!